Slashback: Drivers, Bodycomputing, Farscape

Slashback with news on ATI drivers for non-ATI branded cards, the viewer-led movement to save Farscape, wearable computing from MIT, text-to-facial-expression software, and more. Read on for the details

Maybe customer service isn't dead. On November 28th, we posted a report that OEM cards using ATI chips had trouble with the official drivers from ATI. Terry Makedon (Senior Product Manager, Software for ATI Technologies) writes "Last week we posted a set of unified Linux drivers. These drivers were only loading up on 'Built by ATI' cards. Through our various feedback mechanisms we have determined that there is a large community of 'Powered by ATI' Linux users that did not benefit from our Linux drivers. At this point we are happy to announce an update to our Linux driver (ver. 2.5.1) which will work on both 'Powered by' and 'Built by.' ATI's driver and software strategy is firmly based on responsiveness and we greatly appreciate the feedback our Linux users have provided. Please use http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/ for a direct feedback line to ATI.

Thanks again for the feedback."

But what if we put the show into this Interdimensional Fungubulon, and then jumped through this here "wormhole"? xagon7 writes "David Kemper, the producer/writer of Farscape, mentioned that it would be theoretically and legally possible for a group to set up a non-profit organization for fans to donate money to, in order to finance an episode and make Farscape all that much tastier to Sci-Fi for the 5th season. They have done just that. They have $200,000 worth of pledges and only need $800,000 total....I hope this gets Slashdotted. Read the story here and you can pledge here."

You're getting less happy to see me? man_of_mr_e writes "Check out MIThril, the next generation research platform for context aware wearable computing. It's been about 18 months since this was last talked about here on Slashdot, and it's kind of cool to see how far the technology has come since then. For those that aren't aware of what it is, it's essentially a project to prototype human wearable computers, complete with schematics, pictures, and a cvs repository for software. Now you too can be like that guy in the IBM commercials trading stock while feeding the pigeons."

Flattening the slope to entry. Catskul writes "You don't need the libwine hack, mentioned in the previous news entry. Just follow the New QT Howto, download the codecs and start MPlayer."

Don't look at me in that tone of voice! 1010011010 writes "On Nov. 26, you ran a story on SpeechView, 'software that translates the voice on the other side of the line into a three dimensional animated face on the computer.' The North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science's 'Voice IO Group' is also working on that problem. Their software looks like it might be better. Read about it here. Includes quicktime movies of the results."

Victory, or a reprieve? A non moose cow writes "Just noticed that a couple of my favorite "Killed by the RIAA" webcast stations are back... like Soma-FM and Monkey Radio (get the streams at Shoutcast). The saving grace came via the recent passage of HR5469 [PDF] by the US Legislature. Thank you to all that sent letters and/or money to fix this problem. If you have been yearning for the resurrection of your favorite stream, go check, it might be back. If you would like to trace the chronology of this mess, check out the Soma-FM news page."

What?

[jdkincad]

I hope this gets Slashdotted.

Are you some kind of computer sadist?

Re:Egg Troll has $800,000

[Ribo99]

You must be thinking of LEXX

Re:Egg Troll has $800,000

[GoatPigSheep]

I must agree. I prefer the excellent writing of star trek: enterprise (and voyager before it) to fill my need for good original sci-fi.

Re:Donate..

[Telastyn]

Or at least get it released on Spice rather than SciFi :P

Re:What?

[Lshmael]

Yes, think of the servers! [satirewire.com]

Farscape fund

[El]

And how does this fund help those of us that are too cheap to buy cable?

$$$ money $$$

[MacAndrew]

I don't know about y'all, but for me "only" and "$800,000" don't come in the same sentence. (Except maybe "If I only had $800,000...") And I thought pay-per-view was steep!

I had heard the episode price was closer to $1.7 million ... maybe that was not USD. For our non-American audience, $800,000 is real money. I think you can buy a cruise missile for that much -- which I note might be much more persuasive to those SciFi twits. You know, call a meeting, then appear on the videophone with your demands....

Ambitious project! Damn! Farscapers are making us Mac zealots look pretty tame -- at least when we send Cupertino a couple thousand we get back a computer and a couple window stickers.

$200k in PLEDGES

[WPIDalamar]

So... how many of those pledges are going to fall through when it comes time to pay up? Yeah...

On second thought, never mind. I love that show. I'll pledge the other $600,000!

Re:Donate..

[Sloppy]

why not donate a few bucks to charity so a few kids can eat for a year?

Dress the kids up in rubber costumes, and we can kill two birds with one stone.

The Farscape/Poor children connection...

[hackwrench]

But immagine how much better citizens those children could be if they could only watch Farscape!

Re:A word of caution...

[gladed]

In summary,

1. SciFi creates show for geeks...
2. ...who buy DVRs so they can skip the ads...
3. ...so the advertisers pull their funding [slashdot.org] and SciFi cancels the show...
4. ...and the geeks start whining.

Here's the solution: to watch a TV show you "subscribe" to it for a small fee, but you get a small credit back every time you sit through a commercial. Kinda like a metered sewer system, but in reverse.

Re:MPlayer

[Anonymous Coward]

Because MPlayer is in Hungary (a lawless, anarchistic nation), MPlayer does what MPlayer wants to do. Including packaging copyrighted quicktime software. Mplayer does not take shit from anyone. For example, MPlayer uses the trademark "Mplayer" (originally an internet gaming company from America) just to piss of American lawyers. Also, MPlayer likes to violate the DMCA by being able to play video streams never meant to be playable (like Sorenson and MPEG). This also violates international treaties which say you must pay royalties to the patent office to use its "codecs" (stands for coder-decoder, for all you non-multimedia nerds). Fortuantely, Hungary is land-locked and mountainous, making it not easily succeptible to missiles targeted at its web servers.

Re:MPlayer

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I always thought mplayer was named after the windows media player executable: mplayer.exe

Geez, is no one checking ID's?

[MacAndrew]

You, um, seem to be under the misapprehension that everyone here is 15 and lives at home. Lay off the "coffee and pixie sticks" diet.

Anyway, the group of people that lives in my house is a bunch of leeches. Especially the kids. And I'm not too impressed with the cat, either. ;-)

Re:A word of caution...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Kinda like a ... sewer system, but in reverse.

Thats an image I'd want to keep in mind, a reversed sewer system. Mmm, good.

Bootiful

[bayankaran]

Just installed the ATI drivers for the 8500LE on Redhat8 and it worked just fine...now which are some of the good open GL games in Linux?

Re:personal wearable efforts

[imadork]

If you feel like making your own non-instrusive wearable, one that DOESN'T make you look like a dork ...

And what, exactly, is the problem with looking like a dork?

Re:that's pathetic

[Doktor Memory]

If you're having trouble, read Atlas Shrugged.

Now you have more trouble. Not to mention a hernia.

this is a violation of the prime directive

[outsider007]

I won't dontate money to "needy" charities unless I know the money goes towards things which help build a less needy future, not non-sustainable, stopgap measures.

Are we still talking about Farscape, or starving africans? I agree, farscape is needy because there aren't enough fans to justify the expense of production, and africans are starving because there are so many of them living in a desert. neither is going to change by giving them $1Mil.

Sometimes it's better to just let it go. It's not politically correct to point out but starvation is natural. population is balanced against available resources and equilibrium is reached. Should we drop protein reseqeuencers on a hungry primitive planet? no, even though it's hard to watch people suffer, it's still the wrong thing to do.

should we fund a sick show that's been earmarked for extinction? sorry, I like farscape but it's time to say goodbye.

Re:text to face

[nurightshu]

Unfortunately, Anheuser-Busch gave Pulse Entertainment a whole lot of money to add that feature to their website -- money that could have been spent on research and development of a Budweiser-brand domestic beer that doesn't taste like month-old horse urine. The advertising for that sort of breakthrough would practically write itself:

Want a great-tasting beer, but don't want to send your money over to Fritz and his Nazi pals? Buy new Budweiser Good(TM), the revolutionary new brew from Anheuser-Busch! This is the first domestic beer that won't leave an aftertaste like the floor of a stable -- and because it's made in America by Americans, you know you're getting a quality product. Bud Good(TM): it's your new brew.

And all the while they could have the vaguely homoerotic American working-man images that seem to be so popular these days (which is bizarre because they always remind me of those old Soviet labor propaganda posters). But at least the lip-synching thing is pretty cool.